Nausicaa is an odd movie, and not actually very good in comparison to Miyazaki’s later work. Like most miyazaki films, is at its most powerful on the visual level—but it draws thoroughly from Western surrealists and little resembles his later work. It has more of the surreal medievalism of Moebius’ far futures; faces framed by jewelled hoods, pseudo saxon swords and helmets, Arzach’s steed becoming Nausicaa’s glider and the Valley’s gunship. There is a sprawling, beautiful wilderness—but filled with the bizarre forms of La Planète Sauvage. Nausicaa literally opens with a dude riding the bird-horse from Bakshi’s Wizards.
The opening scene serves as an adequate visual metaphor for how this surrealism functions: an almost familiar landscape is covered in layers of beautifully textured obstruction, rendering its forms abstract and defamiliarized.
This visual boldness, unfortunately, doesn’t make Nausicaa any better as a heroic epic: it lacks the weight that the form needs. (Conjuring this weight, incidentally, is George Lucas’ great gift; but that’s a different post.) But it does contain pieces of his later two epics: Castle in the Sky and Princess Mononoke. Some of the visuals are so similar across the films that you can almost imagine Miyazaki going back and mining Nausicaa for good ideas that were poorly executed—one example would be the world Nausicaa enters beneath the toxic jungle and the swamp where Ashitaka first sees the Forest Spirit:
You can see between those two images how much Miyazaki’s skill as an artist and a storyteller improved between these movies. But later films lack Nausicaa's vision of a sublime world. This it inherits from its surreal predecessors: the world that is not anthrocentric but greater than humanity, overwhelmingly vast in its history, its inhabitants, its possibilities.
In his later work, Miyazaki shifts towards setting his stories in the mundane world. This trend starts with Laputa, which is split between the mundane world on the ground and the sublime world of the flying castle; at the end of the film Laputa sheds its human elements and escapes the earth entirely, leaving our heroes trapped in mundanity. Miyazaki then experiments with domestic stories about magic hidden within the mundane and domestic. Once he finishes with that, he brings what he learned of weight and place and tells his masterful epic Princess Mononoke. The film effectively rewrites Nausicaa but is set in a relative mundane, vaguely historical world, where the sublime only acts through the distant presence of the forest spirit.